Citra is an open-source Nintendo 3DS emulator written in modern C++. It is written with portability in mind, with builds actively maintained for Windows, Linux and OS X. Citra only emulates a subset of 3DS hardware, and therefore is generally only useful for running/debugging homebrew applications. At this time, Citra is even able to boot several commercial games! None of these run to a playable state, but we are working every day to advance the project forward.

We really appreciate the continued support from everyone in the community. We encourage anyone interested to please get involved in our project!

Getting Involved​

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Citra has an active community of developers and we welcome any form of contribution. It is always good to get in touch with the developer community first, though. The best way to do this is via our IRC channel, #citra on Freenode. We also encourage you to check out the Contributor's Guide, Roadmap and Developer Information pages.

Supporting Citra​

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A number of people have asked whether they could support the project via donations. We've been a bit hesitant with setting up something like this, but ultimately realized that it would indeed make a lot of things easier. So if you're interested in helping us out, you can donate via PayPal - any donation received will go towards things like:

3DS consoles - This is the most expensive, but also most helpful point. Developers can use access to actual consoles to figure out how the hardware works. Some developers have bought consoles out of their own pocket solely for reverse-engineering and never played any games with them. We would like this to be the exception, and instead give skilled developers something to work with without requiring them to pay for working on an open-source project.

We also more than gladly accept used 3DS consoles, preferrably ones with firmware 4.5 or lower! If you would like to give yours away, don't hesitate to join our IRC channel and talk to [USER]neobrain[/USER] or [USER]bunnei[/USER].

Screenshots​

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Origial post from Apr 24, 2014

Hey guys…
I'd like to share a project that I've been working on with a few others for the past few months – the firstpublic project to attempt 3DS emulation. "Citra" (https://github.com/citra-emu/citrahttps://github.com/bunnei/citra) is an experimental Nintendo 3DS emulator/debugger written in C++ (and licensed under GPLv2).

At this time, it is in the very initial stages of development, and is only capable of running homebrew. It currently supports:

I want to emphasize that for the long-term, this project will only (potentially) be useful to developers – there are manynon-existent components that are absolutely essential to even loading a commercial game (and furthermore there is no gamepad or hardware 3D support, among many many other things).​

Anyone interested in the project please checkout #citra on Freenode – there is no website/forums.

Really nice job, and it's great for homebrew developers... but I feel this should probably be put in big bold red text to prevent people going "omg when pogeymanz support".

I want to emphasize that for the long-term, this project will only (potentially) be useful to developers – there are many non-existent components that are absolutely essential to even loading a commercial game (and furthermore there is no gamepad or hardware 3D support, among many many other things).